Industry Analysis and Security Consulting

Cloud computing has received a lot of attention these days, but the most important cloud service could be the one that protects enterprises (including other cloud businesses) from malicious attacks. The industry might have finally come to a turning point now that corporations, both big and small, are starting to realize the value of cloud security.

“The markets have matured to adopt what cloud security really means,” said Evident.io CEO Tim Prendergast, who was interviewed by Richard Stiennon as part of IT-Harvest’s 2016 Video Interview Series. “When it started out there was a lot of confusion about the various layers. I think as we’ve seen people progress along the maturity curve in cloud, they really started to understand the unique needs the environment has that are different than they were at a datacenter.”

Prendergast, whose company offers an easy to deploy cloud policy management platform, said the industry has been “able to identify solutions and suites that will work really well for them in addressing the new challenges they face as they move in these very dynamic environments.”

Understanding the Challenges of the Cloud

Prendergast said there has been a dichotomy where there are innovators and the very early adopters who really understand the challenges of the cloud because they’ve been doing it for the last two to four years.

“They tend to find the value in the platform very early and do a homogeneous spread across their entire environment,” Prendergast explained. “So they’ll say, ‘Okay, we’re going to use it as a standard and cover all our infrastructure with it.’ And then we have a lot of emerging players and the early majority. It might be a bank or manufacturer putting their first workload in the cloud, and they want to start with a good basis from the ground up on the development and test environments.”

Evident has found that as these firms progress toward production, they will increase their platform coverage.

“And then over time they mature additional workloads and continue to grow,” Prendergast added. “I think the constant that’s driving this is the cloud is being used more and more everyday, not less everyday, by these companies.”

Going Above and Beyond

Traditional datacenters are becoming a thing of the past. Prendergast said that most businesses have replaced the old model (where a bunch of servers and operating systems run everything) with severs that act as a component of dozens of other cloud services.

“But all those other services are only API accessible,” said Prendergast. “There’s no IP address, there’s no operating system, there’s no way to install your own software on it. Evident creates a way for you to actually cover all those services and the layers of governance, compliance, continuous monitoring and protection that you need in a very modern cloud way.”

Prendergast said that this system is actually “creating security workflows where the teams that are managing the cloud infrastructure are moving in a very agile way.”

“It’s embracing security as part of that DNA and as part of that cycle, and not something that happens at the end of a product lifecycle process,” he said.